I mentioned my research about Mondrian's art and music. After last Saturday's research I was very happy to find this overlap
:
The painter Piet Mondriaan (1872-1944) who, based from his ideas about so called neo-plasticism, started to build a connection with music on the one hand.
"Et quant au moyen de production du son, il sera préférable d'employer l'électricité, le magnétisme, la mécanique, car ils excluent mieux l'immixtion de l'individuel." This is what Piet Mondriaan said in his essay Le Néo-Plasticism (De Nieuwe Beelding) which was published as a brochure in late 1920 by the L'Effort Moderne in Paris. This essay was dedicated to the 'hommes futurs' — future mankind. In this essay, Mondriaan, based on an analogy with a new plastic art (painting), tries to define a new kind of music the sounds of which should ideally be produced by electric, magnetic, and mechanic (i.e. automatic) devices to avoid undesirable alterations based on individual, subjective and interpretational preference.
Mondriaan advocates a kind of music bereft of any kind of personal feelings, depth, warmth, and empathy and whose sound no longer presents the 'roundness', 'swells', 'reverberation', or other typically instrumental characteristics of a romantic idiom. The sounds should rely on a few basic
tones and not be structured harmonically but rather as unbreakable units. They should be experienced as coups' — pulses. No melody, but quick sequences of primary- tones and so-called non-tones. Mondriaan imagines tone fields that are enclosed by three tones: a 'red' one, a 'yellow' one, and a 'blue' one. Based on a concept of confrontation, these fields are counterbalanced by non-tonal fields whose corners are based on a-chromatic, atonal, noises, 'black', 'grey', and 'white'. These six tones have an immediate attack and no release. Together, they constitute compositions of contrasting 'coups' (hits) whose rhythm is open and free. Mondriaan believes chat these tones or sounds need to be generated by electric devices or newly developed musical instruments; it is of prime importance, however, that they be 'fixed' unequivocally in a yet unknown way. In his text about Neo-Plasticism, he therefore talks about soulless things, such as 'l'électricité and "magnetisme' of which he later(in late 1921) said that they were ideally suited for generating tones whose 'wavelength and oscillation' remain constant for their entire duration. He also demands that those new musical instruments, whether or not they are fitted with 'électricité' and 'magnétisme', be capable of instantly switching off a tone, without 'reverberating noises' or the like. These are precisely the criteria that can be met a lot better by electric sounds than instrumental sounds. Electric tones indeed have no body, they do not linger on, and they go off in the same way as when you switch off a light bulb. They never lire and are by definition tight and stationary.(Dick Raaijmakers)

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